The widespread popularity of wireless mobile devices and their growing importance in business calls for robust, fast and secure network coverage throughout your offices. ComputerWorld is a specialist in networking and communication, and we offer a wide range of solutions.

Your network is the glue that holds your entire infrastucture together. Today's modern network has changed dramatically over the last six or so years. What once might have been users connecting single devices via a wired network (and consuming applications on your physical servers) has now become more users connecting many wireless devices and consuming resources on virtualised servers and the cloud. Robust and secure networks have never been more important.

At ComputerWorld, we take time to understand your business challenges, explore the security needed inside those elements and design you a solution made up of the perfect wired, wireless and virtualised components.

The importance of good wireless design

Today’s businesses don’t just need wired to keep employees online at their desks – what they demand is wireless solutions that are flexible and reliable. As more and more companies adopt activity based working, their staff need access to their email, documents and software wherever they might sit down. That could be in a meeting room, company café, breakout area… maybe even in the car park.

ComputerWorld is committed to delivering high quality wireless coverage that’s fast and secure. With our long background in the industry, we have the knowledge and tools required to either upgrade your existing network, or build an entirely new one for you. We’ve worked with small, medium and large enterprises, across a range of industries from education through to hospitality and heavy industry.

Wireless networking

The importance of wireless site surveys

Setting up an enterprise-grade wireless network begins with a site survey. We’ll take into account all your coverage and bandwidth requirements, and assess what kind of WiFi hardware would be most efficient. We’ll design a system for you, install the wired and wireless elements, and set up the software and data packages you need.

Guest access and bring your own device (BYOD) will be seamlessly integrated into the system, and we’ll also provide monitoring tools and can help you manage the network and support users.

Wireless security

From your company’s bank details to confidential strategic data, anything that’s shared on your wireless network has to be protected. ComputerWorld provides a thorough pre-sales consultancy service and can advise you on the most cost-effective and safest security options, and we can help you install the system of your choice.

Working with Ruckus solutions, ComputerWorld delivers wireless solutions that are secure, flexible, reliable and – importantly – affordable. We work with Ruckus because the company has been a pioneer in the WLAN market, delivering consistent connectivity with very low packet loss.

Wired networking

As well as designing, installing and implementing leading edge wireless systems that are secure and reliable, ComputerWorld has vast experience setting up resilient and secure network switching layers from core, through to distribution and edge switching. We have a history of success helping clients in networking.

We are seeing networking go through the next major shift in our industry, we have virtualised and many other components of our infrastructure from virtualising our servers to delivering enhanced and centralised storage, now its the time for the network. Our core and edge networks need to be more flexible and secure than ever before. However most switch manufacturers limit the ability to upgrade and change functionality on the network without replacing the hardware. Our network needs to be modernised to be closer to our virtualised workloads and needs to allow for quick and easy changes without the need to rip and replace the hardware. Many trends we are going to start seeing in our datacenters over the next few years such as hyperconvergence will also require 10Gb core networks that we need to prepare for today.

With these requirements we are seeing the birth of the Software Defined Network or SDN, we are seeing two massive leaders in SDN grabbing the two most critical areas of your network and revolutionising the way you deliver and manage your network.

Case study from Celtic Manor discussing how our team helped them overcome an old failing legacy system in time for the Nato summit.

VMware NSX

VMware NSX allows you to virtualise you network just like you have done with your servers before hand. NSX works right at the hypervisor level and allows you to quickly and easily design and apply networking and security policies right next to your workloads, improving time to deployment, security and ultimately reducing complexity.

Three key areas that NSX can assit you with in your business are as follows:-

1. Improved Security - Microsegmentation

This of microsegementation as a firewall for each and every one of your virtual machines but without the complexity and cost of managing multiple different firewalls. With modern day risks it is no longer sufficient to secure the perimeter of your network we need to secure within as well.

2. Application Availability

Whilst there are many tools such as Veeam and VMware SRM to help you automate and mange the failover of virtual machines to a DR site, networking is a lot more complex and manual. With networking failover you will also need to be including, routing, load balancing and firewalls as well as many other areas. VMware NSX will fully integrate with SRM allowing you to automate the failover of not just the virtual machines but also the important network components. This maybe useful not only when a disaster hits but when also moving workloads during planned migrations.

3. Automation

We can now deploy new servers within a click of a few buttons thanks to virtualisation technologies, however networking may take several weeks to deploy for a secure, multi-tier application. VMware NSX allows you to completely automate the provision of the networking components alongside the provision of your servers.

Dell Networking - Software Defined Vision

Our networks are under ever increasing demand to be more secure and flexible than ever before. However traditional switching architectures are very static, meaning that often to introduce new features and functionalities will require complete hardware refreshes.

Image if you could virtualise your wired switches like you have virtualised your servers in the datacentre, detaching the software features from the underlying hardware and delivering the flexibility to change your network to meet the increasing needs of tomorrow. You now can with Dell and their Open Networking switches. Dell Networking allows you to run a wide variety of Open Networking switching operating systems and applications on their range of ON switches meaning that you are able to be flexible to meet the ever changing needs of the business without needing to rip and replace your underlying hardware. On top of this Dell are leaders in delivering the new networking standards and performance quickly and affordably to ensure you are able to meet the performance demands of your IT infrastructure and ultimately your business.